A case of coronavirus reinfection shows the complexities of the pandemic

The scary thing finally happened: someone caught the coronavirus twice and got sicker the second time around. A 25-year-old man in Nevada got COVID-19 in March, got better in April, and got sick again in May. He had worse symptoms on the second bout, bad enough that he had to be hospitalized.

Three other cases of confirmed reinfection were also reported this week: one in Hong Kong (the first documented case) and two in Europe. These don’t necessarily make me any more worried about our vaccine prospects, though, and they don’t mean the pandemic will go on forever. We have four documented cases of reinfection. But that’s out of the 24 million cases of this disease so far, and rare shit happens. Most experts expected that we’d see at least...

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